Moving back to Birmingham in 2002 was the best thing my wife, Julie, and I could have done for our growing family. We were entering our 30s. We had a fussy 9-month old boy. We missed our family and our home. While we made plenty of new friends in Iowa, but boy, did that cold weather get old fast. Some good friends were launching a new, upscale city magazine, PORTICO, and they wanted Julie to help with the editorial and me to be one of the primary writers on the project. Birmingham was overdue in this department. Other than a chamber of commerce title, at the turn of the millennium, there were few lifestyle magazines of note covering the people and places that make up Birmingham.
Before the move back home, we spent nearly five years on the “oil rigs,” as we called it, in Des Moines, Iowa. Julie worked for the Crafts Group of Meredith Corporation, publisher of Better Homes & Gardens, Ladies Home Journal, and other national titles. I was doing freelance writing, primarily finishing up a book about Alabama’s Cahaba River that flows through the heart of the state and skirts the city of Birmingham just a few miles to the south. I’d also been doing web work for Better Homes & Gardens and other sites at Meredith, playing soccer with a couple fun teams, and was active in B.O.M.S., the Benevolent Order of Misplaced Southerners, a zany group of ex-pat Southern writers, designers, and editors stranded in the Midwest missing gumbo, barbecue, Marti Gras, and our native accents. The time had come to go “Backin’ to Birmingham” as Lester Flatt’s old bluegrass song goes.
The first pressing—and difficult—question was “Where to live?” Growing up in Vestavia Hills in an “Over the Mountain” community, I knew the southern suburbs of Mountain Brook, Hoover, Homewood, and of course, Vestavia, quite well. They are affluent, well-educated cities bunched together just over Red Mountain in a series of ridge and valleys before Oak Mountain several miles to the south. Ranging from cute 1920s bungalows and elegant English Tudor gems to more modern ranches and 1960s and ’70s split levels, the architectural styles of 20th century United States can be seen in these communities and their migration patterns.
My wife was raised just north of Birmingham in Gardendale. A small town in a sea of British-sounding towns like Forestdale, New Castle, and Cardiff. Gardendale maintained its own unique identity, seldom conforming to contemporary trends or the generic pattern of suburban development: At the time there were no movie theaters, few chain restaurants, all in a small, homogenous conservative town with good schools, great sports teams, and little crime. An Alabama Mayberry RFD? Maybe.
While we were courting, that 46-mile nightly round-trip along I-65 seemed so far (but completely worth it) for me to drive, but all told, it’s a revealing perspective on what growing up in the new suburbs was like for me in the ’70s and ’80s. We largely stayed and played in our own Over the Mountain realm, seldom venturing to downtown Birmingham proper except to hang out in Southside or Lakeview where all the cool bars and restaurants were at the time. It was against our parents’ wishes. Urban Birmingham seemed edgy and even a little bit dangerous in high school, even during the early days of college.
But Birmingham changed in the 1990s, nearly all of it for the better. New festivals cropped up, new restaurants, and an exciting downtown revitalization picked up pace. The University of Alabama in Birmingham’s medical center came into its own. Southern Progress in Homewood was the home to excellent magazines like Southern Living, Cooking Light, Health, and Coastal Living, as well as to the creative types who write, photograph, and produce the publications. Health care, banking, insurance, and other service industries made Birmingham into one of the most important business centers in the Southeast while a new Birmingham Civil Rights Institute at Kelly Ingram Park provided a positive coda to a difficult part of the city’s history.
Still, it is the people that make Birmingham such a great place to live. Visitors from larger cities are often surprised at just how friendly folks can be here: Don’t make eye contact walking downtown unless you’re prepared to offer back a friendly nod or “Hello” after a perfect stranger greets you or says, “Good morning.” Birmingham is not a place to get lost in a crowd; you go there to mingle with and become part of the group. “I had no idea it was so great here,” is a phrase long-time residents are more than accustomed to hearing from their out-of-town guests.
So, when did we know we were moving back to Birmingham from Iowa? If I am completely honest, it was as soon as we had our first child. He might have been born someplace else, but he was certainly going to be raised in Birmingham among family, friends, and a familiar culture all our own. As we returned home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other holidays, we kept returning to our favorite restaurants and neighborhoods. We kept meeting with friends and seeing old acquaintances. We missed all the trees, hills, weather, and festivals, even the quirks of this city. Birmingham has a distinctive terroir: It may not suit everyone’s palette, but once you come to recognize that sense of place, it stays with you. It got to be that we were so busy packing in so much during those few days when we visited, we realized just what we were missing. And so we returned home.
And finally, yes, the song doesn’t lie: The sky really is so blue here.